CHAPTER XXXVI.ANDERSONVILLE PRISONERS.

CHAPTER XXXVI.ANDERSONVILLE PRISONERS.

“This seems to be one of the worst cases we have had. I doubt if his mind will survive the horrors he has endured, even if his body does. Poor fellow! his mother would not recognize him now.”

This was what the physician at Annapolis said to Mrs. Simms of a miserable, emaciated skeleton, which had come up from Andersonville with the last arrival of prisoners.

While we in the mountains of Tennessee were tracing the wanderings of Will Mather and Captain Carleton, Mrs. Simms and Annie had stood untiringly at their posts beside the sick and dying soldiers who had learned to bless and watch for the stern widow, and to love and worship the beautiful Annie Graham. And well had she earned such appreciation, for she had been most faithful to the wretched ones committed to her care,—faithful both to body and soul, and in the better world she knew there was waiting to welcome her more than one, whose darkened mind she had led to the fountain of all light. And Annie had made a vow to stay till from that foul Southern prison, where 28,000 men had died, there came to herthe onefor whom she always looked so anxiously when new arrivals came, her blue eyes running rapidly over each wasted form, and then filling with tears when the scrutiny was found to be in vain.

James Carleton had never been heard from since that letter sent to her so long ago, and hope had died out of Annie’s heart, when at last, with Widow Simms, she stood by the cot where lay the insensible form of which the physician had spoken so discouragingly.

It was the figure of a young man, who must once have been finely formed, with handsome face and hair and eyes. The latter were closed now, and only the lids moved with a convulsive motion, as Annie bent over him. The dark hair, matted and coarse and filthy, had curled in rings about the bony forehead, but had been cut away when the bath was given, and the closely shorn head was like many other heads which Annie Graham’s hands had touched, gently, tenderly, as they now moved over this one, trying to infuse some life into the breathing skeleton. He was to be her charge,—hewas in her division and Mrs. Simms’ keen grey eyes scanned Annie curiously as she bent over the poor fellow.

He was helpless as an infant, and Annie nursed him much as she would have nursed a baby whose life hung on a thread. He had been there four days, and only a faint, moaning sound had given token of life or consciousness. But at the close of the fourth day, as Annie sat chafing the pulseless fingers where the grey skin hung so loosely, the eyes opened for a moment and were fixed upon her face. There was no consciousness in them,—no recognition of her presence, nothing but the strained, hungry, despairing look Annie had seen in the eyes of so many of our prisoners, and which to a greater or less degree was peculiar to them all. Annie saw this look, and then underneath it all she saw something more,—whatit was she could not tell, but it brought back to her those moonlight nights upon the beach at New London, and that other night of more recent date, when she sat with Jimmie Carleton beneath the Rockland sky and heard his passionate words of love, and saw his soft, black eyes kindle with earnestness and then grow sad and sorrowful with disappointment. There was no kindling in them now,—no ardent passion or heat of love,—but a certain softness and brightness, and even sauciness, lingered still and told Annie at last who it was.

“Oh, merciful Father! it isJimmie!” she said, and unmindful of any who might be looking on, she bent down and kissed the sunken cheeks from which the flesh was gone.

She had expected him so long, and grown so weary and hopeless with expectations unfulfilled, that she could scarcely believe it now, or realize that the half dead wretch before her was once the lively, humorous, teasingJimmie Carleton. How she pitied him, and how her heart throbbed as she thought of the suffering he must have endured ere he reached this state of apparent imbecility. Then, as she remembered what the physician said about his mind, she dropped upon her knees, and clasping her hands over her face, prayed earnestly that God would remove the darkness and wholly restore the man whom she loved so dearly.

“Doyou think he will die?” she asked Mrs. Simms, who had come for a moment to her side.

“You know him, then. I was wondering that an old woman like me should see clearer than you. I mistrusted from the first,” Mrs. Simms answered, and then to Annie’s eager questioning she replied, “It will be almost a miracle if we do get any sense into that brain, or flesh upon these bones, but we’ll do the best we can.”

Her words were not very encouraging, and Annie’s tears fell like rain upon the face of the man who gave no sign that he knew where he was, or who was bending over him. Oh! how he had longed for the air of the North, as his face daily grew thinner, greyer, and more corpse-like, while his flesh seemed shrivelling and drying on his bones. Bill Baker had done what he could to ameliorate his condition,—done too much in fact, and as the result he suddenly found himself shorn of his privileges, and an inmate again of the dreadful prison. Even then he clung to and cared for Jimmie, until the pangs of starvation and the pains of sickness made him forgetful of all but himself. And there they pined and wept and waited until the day of their release, when Bill was too ill to be removed, and was left in charge of a humane family, who kindly promised to care for him until he was better. From a Rockland soldier who had been taken prisoner at the battle of the Wilderness, Jimmie hadheard that Mrs. Graham was at Annapolis, and then! oh, how he longed for the time when it might be his fate to be tended and nursed by her. She would do it so gently, and so kindly and in his dreams the walls of his pestilential prison stretched away to the green fields of the North, where he walked again with Annie, and felt the clasp of her little hand, and the light of her blue eyes. She was always present with him,—she or the little Lulu, of Pequot memory. Somehow these two were strangely mixed, and when his mind began to totter as the physical strain on it became too great, the two faces were united in one body, and both bent lovingly over him, just as Annie Graham was doing now when he was past knowing or caring who ministered to him. A vague suspicion he had at intervals that in some respects there was a change, that his bed was not the filthy sand bank, nor his covering the pitiless sky. Gradually, too, there came a different look upon his face; the color was changing from the dingy gray, to a more life-like hue; flesh was showing a little beneath the skin, and the dark hair began to grow, and Annie watered the tiny curls with bitter tears, for, as proof of the terrible life whose horrors will never half be written, the once black hair was coming out streaked with grey. They knew in Rockland that he was at Annapolis, but Annie had peremptorily forbidden either Mrs. Carleton or Rose to come. “They could do no good,” she wrote. “Jimmie would not know them; and they might be in the way.”

They were constantly expecting Tom from Tennessee, with Maude De Vere and her friends, and so they remained at home the more willingly, enjoining it upon Annie to write them every day, just a line to tell how Jimmie was.

The summer rain was falling softly upon the streets of Annapolis, and the cool evening air came stealing into the room, where Annie Graham sat by her patient. There were not so many now in her ward, and she had more time for Jimmie, by whose bedside every leisure moment was passed. She was sitting by him now, watching him as he slept, and listening breathlessly to his low murmurings as he seemed to be talking of her and the dreadful prison life. Then he slept more soundly, and she arranged the light so that it left his face in shadow, but fell full upon her own.

Half an hour passed in this way, and Annie’s head was beginning to droop from languor and drowsiness, when a sudden exclamation startled her, and she looked up to see her patient’s eyes fixed upon her, while with his finger he pointed to the window opposite, and whispered,

“The star, it’s risen again, when I thought it had set forever. I take it as a good omen, Bill. I shall see her face again.”

Did he think himself in prison still, with that star shining over him, and did he take her for Bill Baker? The thought was not a very complimentary one, but Annie forgot everything in her joy, at this evidence of returning reason.

“Jimmie,” she said softly, and she bent her face so close to his, that her lips touched his forehead, “Jimmie, don’t you know that you are in Annapolis, with me, with Annie Graham. You remember Annie?”

She had many a time said these very words in his ear, hoping somehow to impress them upon him, and now she had succeeded, for he repeated them after her slowly and with long pauses, like a school-boy trying to say a half-learned lesson.

“Jimmie—don’t you—know—that you—are here—in—Annapolis—withme—with—Annie—Graham—You remember—Annie?”

And as he said them consciousness began to struggle back,—the black eyes fastened themselves upon Annie with a wistful look; then they took in her dress, her hands folded in her lap, the decent covering on the bed the furniture of the room, and then throwing up his arms he felt of his flesh, and examined his linen, and patted the pillow, while still the look of wonder and perplexity deepened on his face. Suddenly he let his arms drop helplessly, then stretched them feebly towards Annie, and while both chin and lip quivered touchingly, and the tears streamed from his eyes, he whispered,

“Clean face, clean hands, soft pillow and bed, with the hunger, and thirst, and homesickness gone. This is—yes, this must be God’s land, andsheis there with me.”

He fainted then. The shock of coming back to “God’s land” had been too great, and for a week or more he paid but little heed to what was passing around him.

“Don’t you know me, Jimmie? It’s I,—it’s Annie,” Mrs. Graham would say to him, as his restless eyes turned upon her, and he would repeat after her,

“Don’t you—know—me, Jimmie? It’s I,—it’s Annie.”

This was a peculiarity of his, and it continued until Bill Baker, who had become strong enough to be moved, came to Annapolis, and asked to see the “Cop’ral.”

At first the physician refused, but Annie approved the plan, hoping for a good result, and she waited anxiously, while Bill said cheerily,

“Hallo, old Cop’ral. Rather nicer quarters here than that sand bank down by that infernal nasty stream.”

Bill Baker’s voice was the last which in the far-off prison had sounded kindly in Jimmie’s ears, and now ashe heard it again his face lighted up, and his eyes kindled with something like their olden fire.

“You know me, Cop’ral. I’m Bill. We’ve been exchanged. We’re up to Annapolis, and Miss Graam is nussin’ you,” Bill continued, and then Jimmie drew a long breath, and burst into a passionate fit of tears. “They’ll do him good. They allus did to Andersonville. He’d hold in till he was fit to burst, and then he’d let ’em slide, and feel better. He’ll know you, Miss Graam, after this.”

Annie was called away just then, to attend to another patient, and Bill was left alone with Jimmie. There were a few broken sentences from the latter, and then Bill Baker was heard talking rapidly, but very gently and cautiously, and Jimmie lifted his head once and looked across the room where Annie was.

“Better leave him alone a spell, till he thinks it out, and gets it arranged,” Bill said to Annie. “I made him understand where he was, and that you was here, and all right on the main question; and though he’d like to have bust his biler for a minute, he’ll come all straight, I reckon.”

It was more than an hour before Annie went to Jimmie again, but when she did, the eager, joyful look in his eyes told her that she was recognized.

“Don’t speak to me,—don’t talk,” she said, laying one hand lightly upon the lips, which began to move, while with the other she smoothed the short curls of hair.

He kissed the hand upon his lips, and whispered, through the fingers:

“Tell me first, was it true, he told me? Do you”——

He did not finish the sentence, for Annie understood him, and bending so near to him that no one else could hear, she said:

“Yes, Jimmie,—I do.”

He seemed satisfied, and something of his old manner came back to him when, later in the day, Annie tried to straighten the clothes about him, and wet and brushed his hair.

“Look like a hippopotamus, don’t I?” he asked, touching his thick-skinned face.

“Not half as much as you did,” Annie replied; and the first smile her face had worn for weeks glimmered around her lips, for she knew now the danger was past, and Jimmie Carleton would live.

Back to IndexNext